Bye Bye Camera is an iOS app that removes humans from photos

Bye Bye Camera is a new app for iOS that does one thing and one thing only: it detects people in the image, removes them and fills in the background. The function should be welcome by landscape or travel photographers who shoot at popular locations that are busy with tourists but is meant to be an artistic statement rather than a photographic tool.

‘I’ve created this project together with two of my longtime collaborators, Andrej and Pavel, from Russia. A couple of years ago I created a collective called Do Something Good where I connected all the people I’ve collaborated with online. By now we’re 16 people around the world from different fields and collaborate on different projects.

The app takes out the vanity of any selfie and also the person. I consider Bye Bye Camera an app for the post-human era. It’s a gentle nod to a future where complex programs replace human labor and some would argue the human race. It’s interesting to ask what is a human from an Ai (yes, the small “i” is intended) perspective? In this case, a collection of pixels that identify a person based on previously labeled data. But who labels this data that defines a person immaterially? So many questions for such an innocent little camera app.’

On a technology level, the app works by using functionality from an image recognition app called Yolo and combines it with a neural network that analyzes the visible elements in the background and fills in the gaps once the person is removed.

This is by no means new technology but on this occasion it is applied with a slightly different purpose in mind: the app wasn't designed to remove the odd bystander who sneaked into your frame but to wipe all humans from your images and capture post-human scenes. If this sounds like something you'd like to try you can download the app from the App Store now for $2.99.

I am creating an app to put famous people in your pictures with you. You will be able to come back from vacation showing you spent your time with Rihanna, Bradley Cooper, the Pope or Elizabeth of England. You could remove them too, in case the relation goes bad.

Stalin would have liked this. In the old days they had to "edit" out the fallen out of favor (and executed) comrades by hand in the dark room. Not sure what happened to these photographers after the editing, off to Siberia ?

The description from the app developer caught my eye. I teach a course on photo criticism, and one of the lessons in the course is that what you see isn't always what the camera got. As example, I use a 1930's photo of Stalin with two of his henchmen, and then show the same photo, edited a year or so later, with one of the henchmen airbrushed out because he'd been purged. Taking people out of the photo has been going on for a long time, and not just for landscapes & city scapes.

@Wye Photography Removing the people was the easy part. Getting their images out of the history books when they were photographed at important events with other important people who are still in government is the hard part.

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